


Haunt Me

by selahexanimo



Category: The Inheritance Cycle - Christopher Paolini
Genre: Gen, Prompt Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-02
Updated: 2013-10-02
Packaged: 2017-12-28 04:44:55
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/987805
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selahexanimo/pseuds/selahexanimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The High Queen of Alagaesia is a haunted woman.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Haunt Me

**Author's Note:**

> Post- _Inheritance_. Written for the following prompt on tumblr: Leave a “Haunt Me” in my ask, and I’ll write a drabble about one character watching over another [as a ghost, watching from a distance, or otherwise, feel free to specify.]

“I wish I had not abandoned Alagaesia,” Eragon says, one night, as he watches Nasuada’s image in his scrying bowl. “I wish… that I had not abandoned you.”

It has taken him years to swallow the sour guilt of his youth, years to finally confess.

Her hands, plucking ivory combs from her greying hair, pause. “You did what you thought was right,” she says, very low. “We all did.” Her eyes flicker to his, and she smiles, faintly. “Do not chasten yourself. You did not abandon me.”

“But you were _alone_.”

She looks away. “I was not.”

He shakes his head. “I should have stayed,” he said. “I know you had Arya and the Varden, but I—”

“Hush.” She touches the glass of her magic mirror, where he suspects his face appears to her. “I do not mean them.”

He starts to protest. But then he looks at her—truly looks, into her dark, unfocused eyes, at her parted lips and still, splayed fingers—and does not speak.

“Did you know…” Her voice is a breath, her words not quite a question. “Murtagh and Thorn never left. Not quite.”

A fist of surprise squeezes his heart. “What do you mean?” He imagines his brother before the Ilirean court, spine straight and face shut down, helpless against the curses of men devastated by war and vicious with loathing. The fist squeezes harder.  “Why did you not tell me?”

“There was nothing to tell.”

Her face is tight and distant. Her hand slides from the mirror. “I never quite saw them,” she whispers. “They were shadows along the cobblestones at high noon. A flash of red scales above the city in the dusk. Once, I thought I saw Murtagh’s face—I was holding a public audience and I thought… I thought that I saw him in the crowd. And always, I felt the brush of his thoughts against mine. Like a half-remembered song—there. But not. Driving me to _distraction_.”

Her voice breaks on the last sentence. She drops her combs, squeezes her hands.

Eragon has never seen her this way. Her breaths come quick, and he hears the crackle of her fingers, as she wrings her hands. There is a hardness in her eyes that is unfamiliar to him—hard not as a queen’s eyes might be, poised upon her throne (composed and unflinching, her authority like steel) but hard as if she is fighting to conceal something.

“Murtagh was there,” she breathed, “through all those years. Hidden. But _there_.” She draws in a deep, shaking breath. “Sometimes I wished he would reveal himself to me. And other times I wished that he would leave, that he would stop _haunting_ me. But for so long, he never did. I thought he never _would_.”

It is a moment before Eragon can bring himself to speak. “And yet you speak of him as if he is no longer there.”

An ugly, joyless smile cracks her face. “I cannot tell you when he left. I only know that one day, I realized he was gone.”

They sit in silence for a long while. Eragon wonders what drove his brother to stay, when Alagaesia was so dangerous for him—and what drove him to go, when he had risked so much for so long.

“I sometimes think that I grew up, finally, and that is why he left.” Nasuada has folded her hands in her lap, and she is again composed (a queen upon her throne, unflinching). “He stayed until the kingdom grew more stable. He stayed until he felt I did not need him anymore. At least… that is what I think.”

She looks at Eragon, touches the mirror for a second time. Her fingertips are light upon the glass; Eragon imagines he can feel the brush of them, their warmth.

“Do not chasten yourself,” she says. “I was never alone.”


End file.
